If a tire pressure of a vehicle is too high or low, the tire may burst or the vehicle may easily slide, possibly causing a big accident. Further, a fuel consumption of the vehicle becomes large, lowering fuel efficiency. In addition, the life of the tire becomes short and the comfortableness and braking force of the vehicle severely deteriorate. In detail, when a tire pressure is low, a hydroplaning phenomenon and a standing wave phenomenon may be caused. On the other hand, when a temperature of a tire is excessively high, a heat separation phenomenon may be caused.
As described above, a tire is an important factor for a safe travel of a vehicle, and in recent years, a tire pressure monitoring system (hereinafter, referred to as TPMS) also called an automatic tire pressure detecting system or a tire pressure detecting system is mounted to a tire to detect a defect of the tire in advance.
The TPMS is an RFID sensor attached to a tire, and is designed to detect a pressure and temperature of a tire and send the information to a display of a driver's seat so that the driver can check the pressure and temperature state of the tire in real time. Through the system, the durability, comfortableness, braking force of a tire can be improved and fuel efficiency can be increased at the same time, making it possible to prevent the body of a vehicle from being shaken severely during a traveling thereof.
The tire pressure monitoring system recognizes positions of tires of a vehicle first and checks rotating forces, tire pressures, temperatures of the tires to recognize the stability state of the tires, using sensors attached to the tires. Thus, the positions of the tires should be automatically recognized first to drive the tire pressure monitoring system, and low frequency initiators (LFIs) have been used to automatically recognize the positions of the tires according to the related art.
The low frequency initiators are installed in a vehicle to correspond to a plurality of tires, respectively, and transmit starting signals in low frequency zones to TPMS transmitters mounted within the plurality of tires. Then, the TPMS transmitters having received the starting signals are woke up, and transmit identifications (IDs) to TPMS receivers installed within the vehicle. The TPMS receivers recognize the positions of the tires through the IDs received from the TPMS transmitters, respectively, and display the positions on a display located in the driver's seat of the vehicle.
However, the automatic TPMS tire position recognizing system according to the related art increases manufacturing costs of a vehicle due to the low frequency initiators installed in the tires, respectively, and requires high maintenance costs when the low frequency initiators are out of order.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.